Category Archives: Psychiatry

For once and for all, conservatives will have to reject outright the illness model of misbehavior if they want to hold on to their delicious outrage over Harvey Weinstein’s exploits.

If you’ve sexually assaulted individuals, you’ve committed a crime. You’re not sick; you’re just a SOB.

Sexual compulsion, like drug addiction, is a misbehavior, not a disease. It certainly does not compel crime. Human beings as moral agents are expected to control their impulses. If they don’t, you punish them. If they can’t; you have them locked up (after due process) for the protection of others .

There is a price for using the therapeutic idiom for crimes or misdemeanors. The price is the medicalization of misconduct. Punishment, then, becomes problematic. For if the offender is seen as without an ability to form the intent to harm—how do you justify punishing him?

Punish evil, don’t exculpate it. The idea of rehab for Harvey is as laughable as the notion that Harvey Sweinstein is deprived, rather than depraved.

Practice: Is this red-carpet celebrity “sick,” in need of a group hug, or just an exhibitionist and a slut? (Feminists will tell you she has the right to walk around like this and expect the Harveys of the world to behave around her. But that’s for another day.) Ol’ Harvey’s was not exactly surrounded by upstanding women. Hollywood hos are not as the sanctimonious Sean Hannity portrays them (“naive, innocent young things”).

What is “hysterical contagion”? A sociologist explains it as the spread of symptoms of an illness among a group, absent any physiological disease. It provides a way of coping with a situation that cannot be handled with the usual coping mechanism.

For example, in 1983, girls in the West Bank fell ill, one after the other. Soon, all the schools and finally the entire community was engulfed, affected with the same symptoms. Arab doctors implicated the Israelis. But of course. The Israeli Occupation had poisoned the girls by gas to reduce their fertility. When real doctors arrived on the scene to examine the neurotics; the girls were pronounced physically healthy.

The frenzied behavior known as mass hysteria or hysterical contagion is well documented. The Trump-Russia “collusion,” “obstruction of justice” probe qualifies, with an exception: This particular form of mass madness involves a meme, a story-line, rather than the physical symptoms observed in the West Bank.

Rumor recounted as fact for which no evidence can possibly be adduced: Indeed, the Establishment and opposition elites have poisoned the country’s collective consciousness. However, it’s the emotional pitch with which the Trump-Russia collusion group-think is delivered, day in and day out, that has gripped and inflamed irrational, febrile minds.

What sociology terms “a collective preoccupation” is fueled by organizational- and communication networks. Friendship networks (the liberal kind) and work organizations (government departments infested with like-minded individuals) serve as nodes in a system that transmits faulty signals across the synapses of this collective, damaged brain.

When you’re the most powerful entity in the world, as the US government certainly is—the only government to have dropped nuclear bombs on civilian populations (“good” bombs, because dropped by the US)—you get to manufacture your own parallel universe with its unique rules of evidence and standards of proof. What’s more, as the mightiest rule-maker, you can coerce other earthlings into “sharing” your alternate reality. Or else.

Conscripted into America’s reality, Iraqis paid the price of this terrible American concoction. Hundreds of thousands of them were displaced and killed due to “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Because of Fake News generated so effectively by the likes of Judith Chalabi Miller, the Gray Lady’s prized reporter at the time, American soldiers paid dearly, as well. Miller shilled for that war over the pages of the New York Times like there was no tomorrow. She’s now a Fox News “specialist.”

To manufacture consent, elements in the intelligence community worked with neoconservative counterparts in Bush 43’s administration, in particularity with “the Office of Special Plans.” And while Fake News babes did wonders to sex up the cause of senseless killing—the dissemination of Fake News, vis-a-vis Iraq, was hardly the exclusive province of Fox News. With some laudable exceptions, Big Media all was tuned-out, turned-on and hot for war.

UPDATE II (6/22): Neocons, statists and party loyalists (categories not mutually exclusive) will reject the thesis is this column. It’s to be expected. (I still thank them for reading.) The column, after all, touches on a deeper truth.

President Trump should quit being so naive (“I will bring us all together”), if he wants to get to make America Great again. Or else, he’ll find himself being overthrown by the Soros-Obama organized rabble.

The US is no longer a nation, but a mass of competing, fractious factions. We The Deplorables are the weakest, because so naive, civilized and sweet. Trump Nation will be toast unless we stand up and fight.

How do we know the protests around the country, so loud in states and counties that went for Trump, are inorganic? How do we know that afoot is a coup attempt?

One clue the unthinking media, Fake and Fox News, are too dumb to point out is this:

Unlike the Tea Party, which sprung up a year into the Obama presidency, and in response to actual and specific policies enacted (see Wikipedia’s Tea Party Protests); the country wide orchestrated coup against President Trump has arisen a mere month into his taking office, in regions where he won handily, and not in response to anything but the existence of President Trump.